Measuring Usability:...
Usability testing. Will users get it?Marketing and design teams often want to know if users will understand a key concept on a website or design. For example, do users understand new terms and conditions, a privacy policy, different product models, prices or the service packages properly?When you want to know if users will understand something in a design, you can quickly see how asking "Did you understand the difference in our service plans?" isn't a good idea.
23 April 2013
Measuring Usability:...
Usability testing. The core idea behind usability testing is having real people trying to accomplish real tasks on software, websites, cell phones or hardware. Identifying what users are trying to do is a key first step. Once you know what tasks you want to test, you'll want to create realistic task scenarios for participants to attempt. A task is made up of the steps a user has to perform to accomplish a goal.
17 April 2013
UX Magazine
Mobile design. If you’re new to mobile usability testing, fear not. It is not as hard as you might think but there are some key differences from testing a traditional website in a lab that you need to be aware of. Over the past year I have done everything from testing a quit-smoking app with a woman whilst she breastfed her five-week-old on her sofa to testing a mobile car insurance website in a lab.
By Tania Lang, 10 April 2013
Measuring Usability:...
Usability testing. Learnability is often used interchangeably with usability. While they are similar concepts, learnability is actually something a bit different. Part of the confusion is that there are two common uses of the term learnability. The first use of learnability describes the ability of an interface to allow users to accomplish tasks on the first attempt.
9 April 2013
UsabilityGeek - Usab...
Cases. In Part 1 of this article, we have seen the usability problems encountered by users when they try to book cinema tickets for kids on a Saturday morning. The websites that were tested were all UK cinema websites: CineWorld, Empire Cinemas and Odeon Cinemas. This article shows two other tasks that were performed by users [.
By Lee Duddell, 28 January 2013
Measuring Usability:...
Usability testing. Traveling is hard. Traveling with children is especially hard. A number of things can go wrong, making the trip difficult or even nonexistent. Some problems are nuisances (sick and/or hungry kids, delayed flights, or the wrong sized rental car), while other problems will lead to failure, which in this case means not reaching your destination on time (forgetting your passport or sleeping in and missing your flight).
22 January 2013
UsabilityGeek - Usab...
Cases. During a recent spot of unavoidable eavesdropping in a slow-moving queue, I overheard two ladies expressing great frustration at their less-than-positive experiences on cinema websites. This reminded me of usability testing on UK Cinema websites that we had carried out in late 2011. Back at the office, I dug up the video clips of user [.
By Lee Duddell, 21 January 2013
Measuring Usability:...
Usability testing. When we have a good experience with a service or product, we enjoy it, tell our friends, and will probably use that service or product again.
15 January 2013
UIE Brain Sparks
Usability testing. Here’s a simple trick that will produce dramatic improvements in your product or service: bring the developers to your usability tests. Have them spend time watching users actually use the things they’ve built.
I’ve been doing this for 30 years and every time it’s exactly the same. As soon as they see someone working with the design, a feeling of pride and “this is why I got into this business” just rushes over them.
By Jared Spool, 9 November 2012
UXmatters
Usability testing. By Caroline Jarrett
Published: November 1, 2011
“The state of satisfaction may include a variety of emotions and … their intensity may vary according to how much you care…. ”
Recently, Janet Six devoted the October edition of her Ask UXmatters column to customer feedback surveys. That column has inspired me to have a go at one particular aspect of customer feedback in more detail: asking about user satisfaction.
2 November 2012
UXmatters
Usability testing. By Kate Lawrence
Published: November 1, 2012
“Your role as a usability test facilitator … should be to facilitate according to your understanding of test participants. And what better way is there to understand them than to engage them in conversation before the testing begins?”
In a previous professional life, I had a boss who insisted that my job as a usability researcher was to “serve it up cold” when conducting usability tests.
2 November 2012
Measuring Usability:...
Usability testing. The Single Ease Question (SEQ) is a 7-point rating scale to assess how difficult users find a task. It's administered immediately after a user attempts a task in a usability test. After users attempt a task, ask them this simple question: Overall, how difficult or easy was the task to complete? Use the seven point rating scale format below. Labels and values: We typically label the end points only and provide numbers from 1 to 7.
30 October 2012
Featured
UIE Brain Sparks
Requirements. In today’s UIEtips, I discusses the difference between failed and missed expectations, and how to avoid them. Here’s an excerpt from the article. When many folks reach into their user research toolbox, the first tools to emerge are surveys and usability testing. However, these are not that helpful with discovering potential missed expectations.
By Jared Spool, 24 October 2012
UsabilityGeek - Usab...
Usability testing. User experience testing and usability testing are absolutely essential for the creation or editing of a successful website. While it is important for all types of websites, testing is particularly important for e-commerce and other complex websites where users will need to do navigating through several pages in order to achieve their objectives. Over the [.
By Daniela Baker, 22 October 2012
Measuring Usability:...
Usability testing. Quantifying the user experience is the first step to making measured improvements. One of the first questions with any metrics is "what's a good score?". Like in sports, a good score depends on the metric and context. Here are 10 benchmarks with some context to help make your metrics more manageable.
16 October 2012
Measuring Usability:...
Usability testing. Usability is attitude plus action. Attitudes and actions are measured during a usability test where a representative sample of users are asked to complete tasks. During the test we collect task-based metrics of performance (completion rates, task-time and errors) and perception (task-level difficulty). We created the Single Usability Metric (SUM) to summarize these task metrics for company dashboards and to track improvements over time.
9 October 2012
Featured
UXmatters
Prototyping. By Jim Ross
Published: October 8, 2012
“The most effective research techniques involve observing participants doing things and talking about what they’re doing. … Therefore, the best way to evaluate a new design is to create a prototype and give participants something concrete to interact with and react to.
8 October 2012
Measuring Usability:...
Usability testing. If you're in User Experience, chances are you probably didn't get into the field because of your love of math. As UX continues to mature it's becoming harder to avoid using statistics to quantify design improvements. One of my goals is to help make challenging concepts more approachable and accessible. Last week Jim Lewis and I gave our tutorial on Practical UX Statistics as part of the Lean UX Denver conference I co-hosted.
25 September 2012
Measuring Usability:...
Usability testing. In 1906 Vilfredo Pareto, an Italian economist, observed that wealth was unequally distributed in Italy. He noted that 80% of the land and wealth was owned by 20% of the people. A similar relationship can be observed in the wealth and income across most countries. A minority of the population tends to generate the majority of the income and controls most of the wealth.
12 September 2012
Measuring Usability:...
Usability testing. Usability testing is artificial. We do the best we can to simulate a scenario that is as close to what users would actually do with the software while we observe or record them. However, no amount of realism in the tasks, data, software or environment can change the fact that the whole thing is contrived. This doesn't mean it's not worth doing.
21 August 2012
Measuring Usability:...
Usability testing. "We want to conduct a focus group to improve our software. "It's something I hear a couple times a month, and almost always when I'm speaking with a product manager, marketer or someone unfamiliar with usability. It's so common that we UX professionals have wryly come to call it the "F-word," a phrase I first heard from Christian Rohrer, now VP at McAfee.
8 August 2012
Featured
UX Magazine
Usability testing. Imagine a formula that would allow you to take data from a very small pool of users (often as few as 8; possibly as few as 3) and figure out why, for instance, Autodesk customers are calling support, whether Budget. com visitors can rent a car in under a minute, or why cardholders were reluctant to use a mobile payment site. Such a formula exists, and it’s not some abstract “formula for success” in management strategy or a design technique.
By Jeff Sauro, Jim Lewi..., 7 August 2012
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UIE Brain Sparks
Usability testing. Moving Beyond Conversion Rates:
Part 1: Avoid Ratios for Metrics
Part 2: Not All Visitors Make Great Customers
Part 3: Visitors Are Not All The Same
Part 4: Campaigns Are Where Conversion Rates Shine
Part 5: Measuring Money Left On The Table (this)
Thanks to Marco Dini for translating this post to Italian.
As you can tell, I’m not a big fan of using conversion rates as a critical key measure of how well a design works.
By Jared Spool, 10 July 2012
Measuring Usability:...
Usability testing. What do you think the most common question in statistics is?Several times a year I teach a statistics course for UX professionals and get asked this question a lot. We're offering the class this fall at the LeanUX Denver conference and a portion of it is available for download. Some attendees have had statistics classes and for others it's their first one.
26 June 2012
Featured
Measuring Usability:...
Usability testing. A lot happens when you observe a user during a usability test. There's the interface, the utterances, the body language and the metrics. This rich experience can result in a long list of usability issues. Issues can range from cosmetic (a user finds the type in ALL CAPS a bit much) to catastrophic (data loss), suggestions (a new feature) or positives (finding defaults helpful).
7 June 2012
Featured
The UX Booth
Usability testing.
If you’ve ever run a research or usability test, you’ll know they can be tricky to facilitate. After all, you’re dealing with people; and people come with a whole host of existing preconceptions, personalities, emotions, and experiences. One thing that can help you to gain more honest and thereby useful feedback from research participants is, in fact, to lie to them.
Data is a sorted sort.
By Lisa Duddington, 5 June 2012
Measuring Usability:...
Usability testing. There is no usability thermometer to tell you how easy to use a website or software application is. Instead we rely on the outcomes of good and bad experiences which provide evidence for the construct of usability. Combining multiple usability metrics into a single usability metric (SUM) is something we proposed seven years ago[PDF] and we wrote about in Chapter 9 of Quantifying the User Experience.
31 May 2012
Featured
Measuring Usability:...
Usability testing. Errors happen and unintended actions are inevitable. They are a common occurrence in usability tests and are the result of problems in an interface and imperfect human actions. It is valuable to have some idea about what these are, how frequently they occur, and how severe their impact is. First, what is an error?Slips and Mistakes: Two Types of ErrorsIt can be helpful to categorize errors into slips and mistakes.
15 May 2012
UIE Brain Sparks
Usability testing. Last week, I attended a conference presentation where a team presented findings from their A/B Testing efforts. It was a cute presentation where they posted the control and test variants, then asked the audience to pick which one “won” the A/B test. They compared the audience answer to the variant that demonstrated the best increase in the conversion rate (sometimes as little as 0. 9%, which the presenters declared as a “huge increase”).
By Jared Spool, 14 May 2012
UX Magazine
Usability testing. In the early 90’s, Jakob Nielsen declared in-person user research as state of the art. “User testing with real users is the most fundamental usability method and is in some sense irreplaceable, since it provides direct information about how people use computers [.
By Sabina Idler, 8 May 2012